Again
by enigma939
Summary: SPOILERS for "The Calm". Oliver doesn't know what to feel when he sees her...because he's felt it all before.


**Again**

**A/N: **Been a long time since I've posted something here. This is my first _Arrow _fic. It's a one-shot set during the opening moments of the Season 3 episode 'Sara'. Please note that there are serious SPOILERS...do not read this if you haven't watched the Season 3 premiere 'The Calm'.

When he saw the body lying on the table, time stopped.

Or at least it should have.

But looking back, Oliver Queen knew with certainty that time _hadn't_ stopped. Not really. Not for him.

It made sense that he was inured to this. To seeing someone he loved dead. In the last seven years of his life, he'd watched so _many _people he cared for die before his eyes. His mother. His father. Shado. Tommy.

Her.

But no, that wasn't the reason. He'd felt _something _all those times. Grief. Rage. Shock. Disbelief.

But now, looking at her, seeing her corpse, knowing he had lost her for the _third _time, he felt...nothing.

Numbness. No, not even that.

He couldn't even begin to process what he was feeling. He doubted there was ever a word for it. How could there be? Who else in this whole Godforsaken world had ever known someone who died _thrice_?

Maybe he felt nothing because he'd been through it all before already. Not that he'd had time to really grieve. The first time she'd died, on the _Gambit_, there really hadn't been time to process it at all. The moment she slid out of view, engulfed by the torrents was water, was a snapshot forever embedded in his memory, but given everything that happened afterwards, the living hell that unfolded from that point on, he'd never had the time to think about the fact that she was gone. Not when he was burying his father. Not when he was on the run from Fyer's mercenaries on the island. Not when he was letting Slade and Shado turn him into a weapon. But he'd at least had time to think about her later, to regret what had happened, to voice his desire to go back someday, seek Laurel's forgiveness, try in some small way to make things right.

The second time, on the _Amazo_, he'd had even less chance to process what had happened. Slade hadn't given him the chance. And later, neither had Amanda Waller. But having already reconciled himself once to the fact that she was gone, and he was responsible for her death, he found it easy to slide back into that frame of thinking. Her miraculous return to life, her death, and the brief time they'd had together in between was like a surreal dream. The ghost of a dead girl. She'd wanted her family to believe she'd died on the _Gambit_. And that's what Oliver led himself to believe to, for four years.

But she'd returned _again_, changed almost beyond recognition. Like he had. They were kindred spirits now in a way they never had been before. She was a fighter. A warrior. No longer a naive, vulnerable college girl who'd run off with her sister's boyfriend. Seemingly indestructible. "I'm not that easy to kill", she told him once, and he believed her. He was convinced that she would never leave him again.

And now, she was gone. Again.

The rational part of his mind told Oliver that this time was different. This time her dead body was lying before him. Her dead eyes staring emptily at his face. This time, there was not a shadow of a doubt. This time, she was gone forever.

That rational part of his mind _also _told him that this time, she had been _murdered._ _Someone _had killed her. Someone he had to find. Someone who had to pay. He had an objective. A target.

Yes, he knew what to think.

But his mind couldn't tell him what to feel.

So he wouldn't feel. Because he didn't know how, in this case. Because, when it came to Sara, all the feeling had been done a long time ago and he'd exhausted his reserve.

There was no way to even begin to explain how to feel about someone dying, coming back, dying again, coming back again, dying _again_...this time for 'real', whatever that meant.

But something else was easy. The knowledge that a woman was dead and her killer, an archer, was out there somewhere. And he had to find that assassin.

So he would.


End file.
